


parting (the sea)

by jtjenna (pornographicpenguin)



Category: Neon Genesis Evangelion
Genre: Biblical References, Canon Compliant, Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, apocalyptic, i tried so hard to get the word count over 1000 but this fic really did not want to do that, oh well, pretension - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-17
Updated: 2014-10-17
Packaged: 2018-02-21 11:25:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 875
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2466491
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pornographicpenguin/pseuds/jtjenna
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When his family evacuates the city, he feels like he's being written out of the story.</p>
            </blockquote>





	parting (the sea)

When his family evacuates the city, he feels like he's being written out of the story.

He's felt like that for a while, actually:  he’s been slowly becoming less and less relevant to events occurring around him.  His classmates slowly dropping out of school, Toji getting drafted, watching as his friends' lives explode into a reign of chaos, pain, devolve into screaming.  While he’s jettisoned out of the action like an injured soldier who never got to fight.  No one will know his end of the story.  Where he goes, what he does.  On some level, he supposes he should be thankful.  He's not.

The metal shell of his camcorder makes his hands itch.  He wants to record something, something good, something that will explain this empty feeling ballooning in his chest, but there's nothing to film.  The sweaty, writhing mass of bodies, maybe, but -- it's too mundane to be worth it.  Evacuation means nothing.  Everyone evacuates.

No, he wants to capture the action.  He wants to be back there, with Shinji and Toji and Katsuragi-san.  The Evas, the end of the world.  The action.

Kensuke gazes out over the massive sea of people sprawled out over this small underground space, all waiting to be transferred out of Tokyo-3.  "The action," he says, but then he's faced with the hopeless, broken looks on all of their faces, the furled eyebrows and knuckles gone white, the tender arms wrapped around loved ones.  All of them, the sea of people, rush and churn around him.  It’s a multitude, a cacophony of people:  their noises, their hopes, their dreams, crammed into one small shared space, a cesspool of the most mundane emotion -- pain.  It’s goddamn primordial.  But he can't shake that feeling of emptiness set hollow in his chest.

And up into that void, that lacuna, rises a tide of something hot and bitter that stings the back of his throat:  he wants to be back there.  He wants to be a part of the action, the happenings, the adventure, the city falling to the ground in a cataclysm of sunburnt orange, the smell of roasted flesh and the broken look in Shinji's eyes.

Kensuke sees the beaten expressions of the sheltered milling around him, the tears streaking down their cheeks and the dead set of their mouths.  They all look just as Shinji had, screaming into the orange-tinged fluid of the Eva.

Above, the intercom blares out distorted names with a dull, grey crack, the monotone reaching into his body and stirring that void in his chest like the billowing of smoke.  It’s right in the center of his heart.

His father places a hand on his shoulder.

Kensuke stands, slapping him away.  He wades out into the crowd and they crash and undulate around him, an ocean of bodies and tears and loss and Kensuke would give anything to not be here.  Needles, spines, sharp points of proximity breach his skin as they touch him, his body, closing in on his physical form but a galaxy from his mind.  He’s back home.  Immersed in an explosion of ash and concrete dust, cascading metal beams warped into antediluvian works of art, he’s gazing out over the mass of radioactive mush where Tokyo-3 used to be.  They press against him, violent spikes of rejection jerking up his limbs to his spinal cord, the brainstem, received by the neurons but not processed because he’s back there, drowning in the lake, filming the apocalyptic tint of the sun from beneath the shelter of still water, the surface tension, submerged beneath that body.  Documenting.  Writing himself back into the story.  

That acidic feeling finds its way to his throat now, tense and caustic as Kensuke makes eye contact with an older woman who has droplets of salt water perched on her bottom lashes, her cheeks drained of color and her eyes rimmed in a puffy pink.  Her husband -- based on the way their fingers twine together, the way they lean into each other like a pair of trees grown intertwined, their arms woven together like branches and their veins spindling through their skin like two halves of a leaf -- has the same bend to his mouth, the hard edges and the downward bow, his eyes lit up with a solemnity that shines with the bald honesty of emotions that force their way straight from the heart.

Guilt, Kensuke thinks.  That feeling, in his own chest.  Guilt.

The stronghold of humanity is burning, has already burned, is nothing but dust and ash.  Kensuke is swallowed up by the crowd again, backwards, like watching a nuclear explosion in reverse, the fire and gas, the dirt and debris compressed into a miniscule, near non-existent space, all of that power and energy packed into an area the size of -- the size of Kensuke.

Walking up to his father is like having the sea close up behind him, like facing the Pharaoh and returning to Egypt.

His father’s arm wraps around his shoulders, pulls Kensuke’s face into his chest.  The flannel of his shirt is soft against Kensuke’s cheek.  “I’m sorry, son,” he says.  Kensuke does not respond; he leaves his eyes open as he stares out into the sea and wishes it was a lake.

 


End file.
